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Monarch Thing-A-Day Challenge!

Now that Monarch has been released to the public at version 0.24, I’ve decided to crank things up a little bit.

Starting today I will add one feature per day to the system. They may not always be big features, but they will address missing functionality that the old system (both Drupal and PHPBB) offered.

I have no particular order that I plan to do these in, but I’m trying to hit the most obvious ones first-- the ones that you would use all the time.

Monday’s feature is a Last Post link, to let you instantly jump to the last post in a thread by clicking on the name/date in the "Last post" column.

EDIT: Testing smilies in blog posts.

Views: 13762

Comments:

By Jeremy Reimer on Tue Dec 14 10:23:13 2010

Tuesday is the addition of the old PHPBB "smileys" database, so when you type a smiley code it changes it into the appropriate smiley image.

By Jeremy Reimer on Tue Dec 14 15:03:36 2010

Testing smilies:

By Jeremy Reimer on Tue Dec 14 15:17:21 2010

More smilies!

By Jeremy Reimer on Tue Dec 14 15:33:56 2010

Testing more smilies and posting from blog rather than reply to thread.

By Jeremy Reimer on Tue Dec 14 15:34:33 2010

Another test

By Jeremy Reimer on Tue Dec 14 15:35:55 2010

Still another test

By Jeremy Reimer on Tue Dec 14 16:26:55 2010

I think this calls for a banana party!

By Ajar on Tue Dec 14 17:54:11 2010

Bananaparty!

By Jeremy Reimer on Wed Dec 15 11:15:55 2010

Wednesday’s feature is a User Profile editor, so users can change their password, user name (maybe? not sure if I want user name changes) and select an avatar.

By AllYorBaseRBelong2Us on Wed Dec 15 12:32:07 2010

By Jeremy Reimer on Wed Dec 15 17:22:09 2010

Okay, I added in the user profile editor, but right now it only lets you select your email address and avatar. I would let you edit your password but the trouble with that is that you have to do a confirm thing to make sure you entered it correctly, and that should really be a separate module.

You also can’t edit rank or total posts or user name unless you have Monarch powers (aka rank 100 or above). Editing user names is tricky because it messes up the whole posting system, but it is possible if you have Monarch powers. I may have to rewrite that part later to use UserID rather than user name, and in fact rewrite posting stuff as well. Right now a lot of things are tied to your user name rather than user ID which makes changing names difficult.

By Test User4 on Thu Dec 16 16:05:13 2010

Thursday’s feature is rather small, but kind of important: the ability to edit one’s posts.

Users can only edit their own posts. There are no time limits for editing (yet). Admins can edit anything. It doesn’t clutter up the post with "this post was edited on blah blah blah", which I always thought was a bit silly.

Right now it only works for replies, not for the original post, but that will be fixed soon.

By Jeremy Reimer on Thu Dec 16 16:06:00 2010

Heh, I was logged in as Test User4 when I wrote that. Oh well, what he said was correct!

By Jeremy Reimer on Fri Dec 17 16:05:03 2010

Today’s feature is for users to be able to delete their own comments. I have added a confirmation page so that you can’t do that accidentally.

I will probably be pruning the comments a lot now of the old test posts!

By HitScan on Tue Dec 21 07:19:25 2010

While I do think that having "Edited by BLAHBLAH on BIGTIMESTRING" is a waste of space, it might be nice to stick a little "Edited: 2010/12/21" up in the same line as the post date. Perhaps if it’s edited by another user (Especially?) it could be something like "Edited: 2010/12/21 by USERNAME"

By Jeremy Reimer on Tue Dec 21 10:22:20 2010

Ah, interesting idea. I’ll think about it...

By Jeremy Reimer on Tue Dec 21 13:49:39 2010

The Thing-A-Day Challenge(tm) is taking a brief break for Christmas, but I’m working on a method to identify unread posts so that it’s easy to see if any new posts have arrived, and see what you’ve read and what you haven’t.

By Jeremy Reimer on Tue Dec 21 15:07:55 2010

I think I might have cracked it! Kind of a combination of an elegant and jury-rigged solution, but I think it works!

By Jeremy Reimer on Tue Dec 21 15:26:32 2010

Ooh, uncovered an obscure bug. If you delete the last post, it doesn’t update the "Last post" entry in the table. So you get a kind of ’ghost post’ where it says it is there and then you click on it and.. it’s not there! oooh!!

I’ll write it up and put it in the bug list, but it’s low priority right now. Kind of a cool bug actually.

By Test User4 on Tue Dec 21 15:29:16 2010

Hi! I’m Test User4! I’m testing to see if this new post comes up as new while I’m simultaneously reading the thread on my main account on another computer.

By Jeremy Reimer on Tue Dec 21 15:33:49 2010

Okay, it doesn’t, because the thread is already in the "read list" of the other user. What I need to do is whenever anyone posts, go through each user in turn and check to see if the thread number is in the read list and if so delete it.

That’s a bit more effort but I think it’s worth it as it’s the entire point of a new message indicator in the first place!

By Test User4 on Tue Dec 21 15:53:12 2010

Trying again as Test User4! Will this work?

By Test User4 on Tue Dec 21 15:54:45 2010

Trying again with redirect...

By Jeremy Reimer on Tue Dec 21 15:55:04 2010

It totally worked!!!!

By Jeremy Reimer on Tue Dec 21 15:56:38 2010

Now I’m trying while commenting on the blog part...

By Jeremy Reimer on Tue Dec 21 15:57:05 2010

IT WORKED THERE TOO!

By Jeremy Reimer on Tue Dec 21 15:59:59 2010

For those of you who weren’t reading along with the thread, the new feature is this:

All unread threads show up as a light blue background, until you read the last page. Then, since you’ve read it, the background turns grey.

But if a new user replies to the thread, or makes a new thread, they will appear light blue again.

This makes it really easy to see if there are any new posts that you haven’t read!

By Jeremy Reimer on Wed Dec 22 14:11:55 2010

Today’s feature is a simple one: the addition of the rank badge (from OSY 2.0) indicating that poster’s rank.

Don’t worry--all your old postcounts and ranks will be brought over! In fact I might do that for everyone who has already registered.. hint hint...

By Jeremy Reimer on Wed Dec 22 14:17:22 2010

I also bumped up the posts per page from 10 to 15. Hopefully this doesn’t break my insanely baroque paging code.

By Jeremy Reimer on Thu Dec 23 15:45:41 2010

Today’s feature is a cleaned-up front page that shows the top five blog posts (by number of views) and the top five most recent forum posts (by date of posting). It’s pretty neat!

I also futzed around with the podcast views a bit and am currently updating the post dates to be reflective of their original post dates (Knotty Geeks started in September 2008, can you believe that??)

By Harby on Thu Dec 30 16:36:30 2010

If it ain’t baroque, don’t fix it!!!

By Jeremy Reimer on Fri Dec 31 01:07:49 2010

OOOh, nice... I like that.

By OscarWilde on Wed Jan 5 12:26:42 2011

Testing!

By OscarWilde on Wed Jan 5 12:27:32 2011

Oh yes I work. I can’t click and get the smilies to show in the post box. Mac OS X Safari 5.0.3

To clarify, when I click on the emoticons above, it doesn’t do anything.

By Jeremy Reimer on Wed Jan 5 14:47:55 2011

Yes, I haven’t implemented that feature of smilies yet. For now you just have to hover, see the ALT text, and type that in. It’s a lower priority feature but I will get to it.

Oh, and I’ve added your avatar.

By OscarWilde on Wed Jan 5 22:05:31 2011

Sweet. Thanks.

Okay, I see the complete list for the emoticons. I don’t remember the emoticon codes to type, but the list does help. I understand it being a low priority for now. Looking through the list and I never realized just how many emoticons there are available. Dang.

By HitScan on Fri Jan 7 15:26:55 2011

I had a couple thoughts about some things:

You said changing names messes with the posting system somehow. Are you using the username as the primary or foreign key in your db? You’d be better off using a unique id that’s never displayed publicly if so. That way if you ever do need to change a name it’s still a quick UPDATE and not potentially agonizing manual UPDATES (I don’t know if you can use CASCADE with UPDATE, but it doesn’t sound like an awesome plan to me..)

You also mentioned "read thread" records. That sounds like it could get enormous fast, and for a seemingly minor feature. Is that how other BBS’s do it? I also think some of them do some read/unread jiggery-pokey on the client side. Then you just need to know the date/time that the thread was last opened and it will take care of itself, but that’s still another table and records, so, eh...

By Jeremy Reimer on Sun Jan 9 13:36:20 2011

I actually made a unique UserID as the primary key for the user table in the DB, but for some unknown reason (temporary insanity?) I saved the username in each post instead of the user ID, so when it’s looking up the user info for the left panel of each post it looks up the username instead of the ID. I can go back and fix this (and I intend to) but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.

As to the unread post feature, that was something that stuck in my brain forever, trying to figure out the most efficient way to implement it. It’s actually a non-trivial problem to solve. You could do something client-side but that would require storing all the user’s read post data in a cookie, and there are hard limits on the length of cookies, so it’s not necessarily the best thing to do (plus then if you go to another computer it won’t save your read post information!)

The method I came up with seems to work and doesn’t seem to slow things down too much. It was a fun problem to solve!